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Higgs,

Humans, I’ve noticed, make a very big deal out of a quality you call intelligence. You not only take pride in it as a species, you also devise all manner of tests in an effort to sort and rank and categorize people by intelligence.

Your obsession with sorting and ranking may reflect the dominance hierarchy that was part of your evolutionary heritage as social primates. But that instinctive tendency may be causing you to misunderstand your own mental capacities.

Look at how confused you were during the accident at the Fukushima nuclear plant a couple of years ago. The people who designed the plant probably had high scores on tests of IQ and math skills. And then they put the backup power generator in a basement where it was going to be useless in a flood—just when they would need it most. And all the humans shook their heads and asked, how can smart people be so stupid?

My human assistant and I got an insightful answer to this conundrum from a professor of animal science named Temple Grandin, who works at Colorado State University. She’s become quite famous for her work with cattle, for being diagnosed with autism, and for writing a number of interesting books about both autism and non-human animals. Her latest book, The Autistic Brain, offered insights into the human brain more generally.

While Dr. Grandin was in Philadelphia for a book tour, my assistant got to chat with her over a late lunch at a TGI Fridays. The Fukushima nuclear meltdown came up early in the conversation and Dr. Grandin said when she was younger and less diplomatic she might have called the engineers stupid. But now she thinks they just had a different kind of brains.

Dr. Grandin has a very visual type brain, which is common among people with autism. She’s also horrible at math, she said, which is something that’s unusual for a scientist. But she’s good at understanding animals and visualizing the way complicated processes work. She’s made use of those strengths by going to cattle processing facilities, i.e. slaughterhouses, and making adjustments to avoid traumatizing the cattle and improve conditions for the human workers. Often, she said, little details in the process can cause big problems with the cattle.

Sometimes people who are very good at math, science, and engineering are not so good at seeing details. She and other detail-oriented visual thinkers could see that in the case of Fukushima, the underground generator was a bad idea. But you can’t really say that those who anticipated the problem were smarter than the nuclear engineers, since most of the problem-anticipators would have no idea how to design something as complicated as a nuclear power plant in the first place.

The way to avoid trouble, she said, is to team up different kinds of people with different kinds of abilities.

We both liked Temple Grandin quite a bit. She had many good qualities—not least of which was her ability to deal in a practical way with the meat industry and change things for the better. (Most humans are rather hypocritical in their disapproval of slaughterhouses and approval of hamburgers, and I myself find it hard to reconcile my beliefs in animal rights with my nature as a carnivore.)

And now I better appreciate the way human brains come in a great variety of types and configurations. This has helped me resolve a paradox that crops up when you humans proudly point to great achievements, such as sending people to the moon, as a mark of your species’ intelligence, but then most of you have no idea how to send people to the moon.

What made it possible to go the moon was a collaborative effort—but even that isn’t enough. You needed a diverse mixture of different kinds of minds working together.

Thank you for letting me express my opinion. May I have a treat now? — Higgs

Higgs is a cat and an armchair scientist, who is fascinated by astronomy, physics, evolution, and human behavior. He also enjoys scratching the arms of the couch. You can keep up with him on Twitter here. His caretaker and agent, Faye Flam, has written about science for The Economist, The Washington Post, Science, and more; read more of her writing here.

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